SMARTLY DONE

by John M. Floyd

As usual, I was digging through old files awhile back, and found something from my IBM days. It was several pages of notes I’d taken during the joint IT department meetings we used to have at the local banks each week — except these notes weren’t about technical issues. These were things I wrote down out of fascination, for the sole reason that some of the things people said in the meetings made no sense at all.

Here are a few of them, and I swear they’re true — I heard them with my own ears:

“Our basic plan has been based on the factor of eliminating that possibility as much as possible.”

“We need to analyze the performance and contention as it magnifies the access.”

“I was afraid we might not be able to do that where you are because of what I thought that meant.”

“We are finding out the ramifications of those effects that we didn’t heretofore know.”

“That scenario was predicated on the fact that we all get better results no matter what the group content is.”

“The only real reason I want to understand is to solve a confusion in my own mind about how that works.”

There are more — all dated and identified by speaker — but you get my point. Sometimes we make statements that might be clear to us but are total gibberish to those who’re listening.

Or those who’re reading. I seldom see anything in print that’s quite as goofy as some of the things I heard in those meetings, but I still find myself confused at times, when I read a short story or novel.

On the flip side, things are sometimes said so well and so brilliantly that you not only understand, you wish you’d been the one to say them. Here’s another example from my distant past: At a roadside cafe one night during my college years, four of us students sat down and ordered burgers and beer. When the frazzled and overworked waitress plopped our orders down in front of us, we noticed she’d forgotten to open one of the four cans of beer (my roommate’s). This was before pop-tops were available, at least in our area, so all of us, including the waitress, just looked for a minute at his intact and unpierced can. Finally she asked, blowing out a weary sigh, “You want that opened?”

My roomie stared back at her. “No,” he said, “I’ll take it like a capsule.”

She didn’t find that particularly funny, but the rest of us did, and I remember it because that’s exactly the kind of impromptu remark I always wish I could make, but that I only think of hours later. And even though I didn’t realize it then, that’s the good thing about writing — it gives us time to go back and, during the editing process, put in all those witty and profound and cool little things that the mind (at least my mind) can’t seem to come up with on the spur of the moment.

It’s a great feeling when the words end up exactly right. Consider the following:

A repulsive murderer has been himself repulsively, and perhaps deservedly, murdered.
— Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie

You don’t look out for yourself, the only helping hand you’ll ever get is when they lower the box.
— “Hud,” adapted from Horseman, Pass By, Larry McMurtry

I asked him one time what type of writing brought the most money and the agent says, “Ransom notes.”
— Get Shorty, Elmore Leonard

If you take a bad boy and make him dig a hole every day in the hot sun, it will turn him into a good boy.
— Holes, Louis Sachar

On the day of my judgment, when I stand before God, and He asks me why did I kill one of His true miracles, what am I gonna say? That it was my job?
— “The Green Mile,” adapted from the novel by Stephen King

I could find you in the dark, Mrs. Lowe. And I’m only part Indian.
— Hondo, Louis L’Amour

That kind of writing is not only clear, it’s beautifully done. And I’m not referring only to dialogue, or only to fiction. I found the following paragraphs in works of nonfiction:

Nothing in English criminal law seems more disgusting than public hanging. We are apt to think of it as the very saturnalia of death: a man or woman carted through the screaming mob that lined the road from Newgate to Tyburn, and then killed by a civil servant while more pockets were picked around the scaffold than the victim had picked in his life.
— The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes:

Whenever a deep-sea swell enters shallow water its leading edge slows. Water piles up behind it. The wave grows again. It is this effect that makes earthquake-spawned tsunamis so deceptive and so deadly. A tsunami travels across the ocean as a small hump of water but at speeds as high as five hundred miles an hour. When it reaches land, it explodes.
— Isaac’s Storm, Erik Larson:

Disneyland, and the idea of it, seemed so glorious that it should be in some faraway, impossible-to-visit Shangri-la, not two miles from the house where I was about to grow up. With its pale blue castle flying pennants with a made-up Disney family crest, its precise gardens and horse-drawn carriages maintained to jewel-box perfection, Disneyland was my Versailles.
— Born Standing Up, Steve Martin

I somehow doubt that any of those authors — even Martin, who’s lightning-quick when performing — came up with those flowing passages without a lot of rewrites.

I once heard that clarity, more than anything else, is what we as writers should strive for. If we think something might not make sense to a reader, it needs to be reworked. Period.

I’m reminded of the deadpan remark made by a Roman citizen in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” to a soldier who had snapped to attention and raised his sword in a stiff salute. “Smartly done,” he said.

As a writer, I hope the same can be said of my stories.